Once Upon a Time (A Princess Escaped)
by aeotae
Summary: One Shot. 1,000 words. Once upon a time there was a Lucy and a Natsu; they were small. This is what happened next (or a little of it anyway). NaLu.


Disclaimer: I do not own Fairy Tail, and I do not make any profit from this work.

Once Upon a Time (A Princess Escaped)

A Very Short One Shot

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Once upon a time, there lived a small girl (blonde, brown-eyed, and lovely as the softest twinkling stars, if you must know). She was also a small girl of great consequence and value. In this, she was lucky, althouh she hardly felt it. It's hard to feel lucky when one is being traded around by one's distant relations, as the small girl was being traded around. It's even harder to feel lucky when one is an orphan, as the small girl was an orphan and a recently made one at that. Passerbys and villagers alike remarked, regardless of the small girl's personal feelings, that she was quite lucky, despite these things.

They were right, of course, in a far-off, trees for the forest sort of way. Most little orphan girls had no relatives who would be willing to trade their properties on the Fiore coast for the priviledge of being named the small girl's primary caregiver in charge of overseeing all inheritance. Any other little orphan girl might be happy to be traded as part of these deals, if it meant she'd have a roof and a meal and a warm blanket or two. You'll have to forgive the small girl for not seeing this, and, I hope, forgive her when she starts to cry, heedless of her good fortune.

The uncles and aunties and third cousins are heedless to her tears as they stream quietly down her small face-tears cannot be traded for bolts of silk and damask or a jeweler's clever crafts, and that was all these relations had any attention for.

Luckily for the small girl (the real luck this time, the kind that comes from fairy wishes, properly positioned horse shoes, and four-leaved clovers), very luckily indeed, there was one other person in the room who was no uncle, aunt, or otherwise previously unknown relation. This other person, who was only there to earn a few jewels for escorting one of the aunts, was a small boy. He wasn't only any small boy of course; he was the best kind of small boy-the kind who sometimes notices when he is needed for important matters. He was also the kind of small boy who, while knowing nothing of the market-value of orphaned heiresses, had heard (and felt, primarily with large bruises) a thing or two about the perils of small girls left crying lonesomely. In short, he was the kind of small boy the small girl was quite in need of at that moment.

Clever as he was (on occasion at least) and Brave, the boy quickly created a Plan for Daring Rescue, which he quite felt, somewhere deep in his belly, was an Important Thing to do for the small girl. It was not a very good plan (it was not the right occasion), but, luckily, in the end, it worked (and the small girl stopped crying-but we will get to that later).

The plan was this-he'd make her his princess, and they'd run away where he could teach her how to beat up all the bullies that made her cry and tried to trade her in for faster returns. It wasn't, as I have said, a very good plan, and, certainly, he may have gone down a much simpler path and patted her back and brought her chocolate, but, alas, this small boy had very little experience with simple plans and a great deal of experience with girls who were only happy after adventures that involved beating up bullies (admittedly, he had no experience with the princess bit, but the girl's pretty fancy dress and tiny little wrists had made him think it, and, once thought, he found himself warming up to the notion quite quickly).

Once formed, the plan needed only for execution, and this, of course, was the small boy's favorite part of any plan (he loved it so much, in fact, that he often just jumped straight into the middle of his best plans without the thinking coming first).

And so, it was with a huge and dazzling grin and an excited shrieking sort of roar that he grabbed the small girl's hand and pulled her towards the nearest door, dodging ruffled relatives and leaving only the small girl's tears behind. She followed, miraculously, and the small boy quickly forgot about the niggling worry he'd briefly felt. He ran and ran, never letting go of the small girl's hand, even after the protests of panting relatives and much-embarrassed former employer's faded behind a curtain of tree trunks and helpful leaves. Eventually, when he felt suitably victorious and had begun to contemplate how he could go about making the small girl his princess (he thought maybe it involved slaying a knight in shining armor), he decided to stop.

The small girl, although sad and shocked and taught better than letting strange small boys drag her out of doors (especially if those strange small boys had strange pink hair like this one did), found herself unable to form any word of protest as she found herself suddenly out of that room in which, only a little while ago, she'd kissed her Mama and Daddy good night for the last night ever. It might have been the sudden burst of cold fresh outside air that stunned her brain; it could have been the the grubby hands that made her fingers warm. It could have been any number of things that made her not want to tell the small boy to let her go, but, when she looked back later (a long while later because it would take her awhile to have a spare moment to do any looking back at all), when she thought about that moment, she was really quite certain that it was the small boy's grin, which looked like hope and promises and unconquerable enthusiasm, that, instead, made her only say, "I'm Lucy, who are you?" before she followed him anywhere at all he wanted to take her.

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Author's Note: Well, it's writing. I've had buckets of trouble trying to finish anything at all lately, so I hope you forgive me if you find this particularly unfinished. I'm hoping that conquering a 1,000 word one shot will spur me on for my left-on-the-burner works. We shall see. I'll be delighted to receive any feedback!


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